The Winter of Our Disconnect (28 page)

Up to that point, Bill had barely picked up his instrument in two years. From that point, he has hardly put it down.

In the ensuing weeks and months after that pivotal first lesson, I watched my son evolve like a human Pokémon from a surly, back-talking gamer to a surly back-talking musician in-the-making. (LOL.) To this day, Bill insists that it wasn’t The Experiment that changed him. It was the friends, and the teacher they’d led him to. “Ah. I see,” I reply.

“The technology ban was nothing but a trigger,” he adds, a little less certainly.

“Ah, a trigger,” I echo. (Bang, bang! I think to myself. Got ’im!)

Sussy ended up switching friendship groups too. But she was under no illusions about the role The Experiment played in bringing about the change—nor was the Year 10 coordinator at her school. “Sussy has shown a marked improvement in terms of not only her demeanor but also her organization,” she wrote to me in April 2009. “She seems to be adapting to having to complete any electronic work at either school or at her friends’ house and her uniform has been consistently pleasing.” (A big clean-out of her bedroom uncovered not one, not two, but three “lost” name tags, which she took to wearing in a row on her blazer pocket, like war medals.) “Sussy seems to be a happier student who is becoming more independent and taking more responsibility for her learning.”

Loss of Facebook (not to mention loss of MSN and MySpace) seemed to increase her focus generally; at the same time, it put her out of the loop with her old friends. “With Jen and Cat and that kind of group, you figure stuff out on the computer, like sleepovers and stuff,” she explained to me at our midterm interview. These invitations happened spontaneously, usually on the spur of the moment, in fact, with little or no notice. If you blinked—or, more to the point, if you went offline—you missed them. The girls in Sussy’s new group at school didn’t operate like that. “We planned a sleepover a week in advance!” she told me proudly, and slightly incredulously.

Sussy’s Experimental coping mechanisms differed from Anni’s and Bill’s significantly. The older kids took the opportunity to go out more—shopping, visiting, or clubbing in Anni’s case, and hanging out at the pool or jamming in somebody’s garage in Bill’s. Sussy had fewer friends who lived in the neighborhood, so she faced major transportation issues. Her best girlfriend, my goddaughter Maddi, lived in Melbourne. Her closest boy chum, Andy, had just moved with his family to England.

Partly for these reasons, her overall media time budget probably remained unchanged.

She clung to the landline like a drowning teenager to a life raft. After school, she’d install herself in the family room, echoey and airplane hangar-like now that it had been clear-felled of its media and their bulky accoutrements, and hold court before an unseen audience for two or three hours at a clip. She assured me that both Maddi and Andy had their parents’ permission to ring her as often as they liked; it seems they had magic Internet landlines that made long-distance calls for free “or just about.”

“What if you need to ring them?” I wanted to know.

“Easy. I just send them a signal—I ring once or twice and then hang up. Really, Mum, we’ve got it all figured out.”

Many people have asked me if there was ever a moment during The Experiment when I was tempted to quit. Not counting April 25, the day I received a phone bill for $1,123.26, I can honestly say, no. Not at all.

Digital Immigrants use technology to achieve specific ends. Digital Natives breathe technology in order to . . . well, breathe. To exist. Before The Experiment, Sussy had pretty much lived online. Now she was pretty much living on the phone. Cleverly, she also used it to gain access to banned media. “Google ‘Nick Jonas!’” she’d bark into the phone to Maddi, when the need to know the details of Miley Cyrus’s relationship status grew unbearably urgent, or, “Check my Facebook!” (the girls regularly, and companionably, hacked each other’s accounts anyhow), or, “Message Andy and tell him to ring me at eight my time.” Maddi was now more than a best friend. She was Sussy’s personal remote outsourcer, carrying out her digital bidding with terrifying dispatch.

Their relationship changed in less obvious ways, too, during those marathon conversations, and so did her connection with Andy. “On MSN, you’re kind of almost waving at people. You get introduced, and it’s like hi and LOL and ILY and stuff . . . but you never really get to
know
them,” she explained to me. “On the phone, it’s totally different. It’s like D&M.
^d
You get close. You get tight.”

Anni agreed with that. “I think it’s definitely a more intimate thing. Talking on the phone isn’t the same as face-to-face, but it’s a step up because you have the tone of voice and everything, and you can infer so much more than from stuff that’s typed up. Texts are like decoding messages—so hard to interpret! It’s always like, what did they mean by that? Are they kidding? Are they being nice? Are they being condescending?”

Do you think people are more honest in phone conversations? I ask Suss. “Yeah, and you explain stuff. And they ask questions and stuff, and . . . I don’t know. How am I supposed to know? CEEBS!” (Munted family acronym deriving from CBF—couldn’t be f#*#ed.)

 

 

“Only connect.”

“Only connect.”

“Only connect.”

With no new message alerts to distract me, I keep going back to Forster’s mantra . . . or was it a plea?

What lies behind our mania for media, anyhow? Before, I assumed it was something to do with our insatiable appetite for entertainment, for data, for distraction. Now that we were in the purge stage of the bulimic cycle—digitally, that is—I wasn’t so sure. Maybe our most implacable desire, our most deeply human yearning, is simply to achieve contact. To . . . connect.

James Harkin, author of
Lost in Cyburbia
, observes correctly that our new media deliver “connection” in an entirely unprecedented way. Old media delivered stories. Our new media—e-mail, IM, social networking, microblogging—deliver
people
. Social intercourse. Contact. The technological equivalent of holding hands, or even making eye contact.

This drug we’re craving . . . could it simply be each other?

For young people, the evidence is clear that Facebook is literally better than sex. And I do mean literally. According to Internet tracker Hitwise, visits to porn sites dropped by a third between 2005 and 2007. By 2009, the industry outlook was so grim that
Hustler
publisher Larry Flynt got on his knees to the federal government seeking a $5 billion “stimulus package.” (Ew.) Evidently the most precipitous loss of libido has been among users aged eighteen to twenty-four—the same demographic who, not at all coincidentally, have invented the joy of friending.

Not only are social media better than sex, they reproduce more efficiently too. Network theory reminds us that the number of possible connections between points on a network rises much faster than the number of points themselves. (Two people with fax machines can only talk to each other. But five people with fax machines create twenty possible channels; and twenty people with twenty fax machines, 380.) The resulting explosion of connectivity, Harkin tells us, makes networks exponentially powerful. Just like kids, really. You give them an inch, and they take a gigabyte. When advertisers exploit this principle, they call it “going viral.” When Facebook or LinkedIn users do the same, we call it social or professional networking. When our kids do it on Facebook Chat or AOL or Google Talk, we call it a huge waste of time. Hmm.

Seriously, it is exactly this network effect that turns a teenage birthday party for twenty close friends into a drunken, gate-crashing horde. Or that makes “sexting”—the mass forwarding of sexually explicit photos via cell phones—such an insidious and effective form of cyber-bullying. The network effect enables collaborative enterprises such as Wikipedia and YouTube (the latter so huge it accounts for 10 percent of the Internet’s entire bandwidth) and propels the careers of out-of-the-box upstarts such as
Britain’s Got Talent
’s Susan Boyle, or, for that matter, Barack Obama (an unabashed BlackBerry addict, let us not forget).

James Harkin tells the story of Shoreditch Digital Bridge, a project that provided free Internet access to people living in a public housing estate in east London. As an afterthought, the project managers also decided to offer residents access to CCTV surveillance images. These security cameras were already providing twenty-four-hour monitoring of communal areas, so why not broadcast it as a channel like any other? Nine months later, a leaked report showed that residents watched the closed-circuit security channel as much as they did prime-time broadcast television. Literally more people tuned in to view each other than to see
Big Brother
.

The medium has become the messenger. Caught in the sticky tendrils of Web 2.0, we stand transfixed, not by “data” or even “entertainment,” but by ourselves. What bedazzles us most of all is not the shock of the new but the shock of recognition. Of affirmation.

“Only connect,” indeed. Could Forster have imagined how relevant that commandment would become in the age of Apple? For that matter, could he have imagined a $1,123.26 phone bill?

Keeping oneself in the loop is all well and good—but where will it end? Well, that’s the thing about a loop. It
doesn’t
end. Futurist Raymond Kurzweil predicts a coming techno-evolutionary quantum leap that he calls “the singularity.” Beings of this new age, half human and half machine, will be endowed with enhanced, yet alien, brains and near-immortal lifespans.
³⁰
Gosh. Perhaps we will call them “teenagers.”

 

 

 

Have stocked up on CDs and tapes—tapes!—from the library, and Bill loving his new turntable. (“What do you like best about it?” “The crackle!”) Also confesses he enjoys the turning part of the turntable—just watching records revolve. A novelty, I guess, in a world of CDs and audio files. Has raided various friends’ parents’ closets for LPs and amassed huge collection already: Doors, Bob Marley, Stones, Beatles.

I sneak down to his bedroom sometimes just to see him lying on his bed, reading and listening to seventies music—“Like something out of
Back to the Future
,” Sussy hisses.

Girls and self magged out with
Wish
,
The New Yorker
(great Lily Allen profile—now there’s a girl who knows about oversharing . . .),
Sunday Times Magazine
—local gossip column a total crack-up—and
Girlfriend
(“Is Your Boyf Too Metro?”).
That’s
entertainment.

 

 

 

Listening to music and doing nothing else at the same time? How weird is that?

But am doing it anyway: practicing Thoreauesque attentiveness listening to my new Leonard Cohen CD.

BILL: I find school an intrusion on my saxophone practice. SUSS: I find your saxophone practice an intrusion on my life.

SUSS (ON PHONE—WHERE ELSE?): Oooh, sorry! Well, break a leg! ILY!!

ANNI: What’s up? Is Maddi out on a date or something?

SUSS: Nah, she’s just making her entrance in the school play.

ANNI: WITH HER CELL PHONE SWITCHED ON??

SUSS (WITH DIGNITY): Of course not. It’s on vibrate.

 

 

 

The Fremantle public library rocks. Hadn’t been there since I used to take the kids for story time and a hand-stamp back in the nineties. Go on Saturday afternoons now, after chores, and today check out six items JUST FOR ME! Weird Norman Mailer book about Jesus,
On Kindness
, some yoga book for the decrepit (i.e., me),
The Namesake
,
The Death of the Grown-up
(seemed appropriate under the circumstances), and a Thelonious Monk CD. Such a thrill of anticipation, bustling around making tea and laying the fire like some jazz-loving Jane Austen character.

 

 

 

Suss home from school today excited about Emily Dickinson poem she read in English. Amazed and slightly spooked when I produced
The Complete Poems
and showed her the concordance at the back. “It’s sort of like CtrlF for fossils,” I explain. Still couldn’t find the poem she wanted. “You could always ask Maddi to Google it,” I suggest evilly. “NO!” she cries (though am still not sure why).

Frances rang about coming over to work on captions for her book. Remind her I don’t have a laptop. “No worries,” she says. “I’ll bring mine!” Explain, gently, that she can’t do that either. “But it’s not as if we can’t do them in longhand.”

“Tell me you’re joking,” she pleads.

Kids hoot with laughter when I tell them.

Seeing grown-ups get their comeuppance: Does it get any better than that?

 

 

 

Bill’s b/day tomorrow: SWEET SIXTEEN!!!!

Gifts purchased: Coltrane two-disc set; Coltrane songbook; ten Murakami books (including one collection called
Birthday Stories
), and two hipsterish T-shirts selected by A. & S., who are getting him LPs from op shop.

Last year he got a Nintendo DS.

Yelled at A. for playing Snake in the car on her phone. “I’m not in the house!” she snapped. But put it away.

 

 

 

“Did you ever think you’d be excited about getting eleven books for your birthday?” I ask Bill happily. I think we all know the answer to that one.

Lovely Japanese b/day dinner at Fuji followed by bubble tea at Utopia (an Asian fast-food joint and B.’s self-proclaimed “spiritual home”). He ordered mocha bubble tea with large chocolate sago, and Suss had an Oreo smoothie. Weirdness! A. & I amused ourselves examining the plastic sample meals. Laughed nonstop and had the best time just hanging out together.